ESL Flow is Dead


It was 20 years ago that Gary Smith coined the term [getkc id="48" comment="Electronic System Level"] (ESL). He foresaw the next logical migration in abstraction up from the [getkc id="49" comment="Register Transfer Level"] (RTL) to something that would be capable of describing and building complex electronic systems. He also saw that the future of EDA depended upon who would control that marke... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

One Flow To Rule Them All


The new mantra of shift left within EDA is nothing new and first made an appearance more than a decade ago. At that time there was a very large divide between logic synthesis and place and route. As wire delays became more important, timing closure became increasingly difficult with a logic synthesis flow that did not take that into account. The tools subsequently became tied much closer togeth... » read more

HW Vs. SW: Who’s Leading Whom?


In the past, technologies were developed in the software world that have languished until they were taken up by the hardware community. Then they were refined and polished and became fully integrated into the hardware development and verification flow. Examples are lint and formal. That was followed by attempts to migrate methodologies, such as object-oriented programming, which is the basis fo... » read more

Say Hi To Hybrid


It has been proposed for some time that virtual platforms could be linked to emulation hardware in order to co-verify the software and hardware components of an SoC. However, that proposal now has evolved into hybrid emulation, a practical solution to allow pre-silicon verification and validation of today’s complex SoC designs. First-rate work by the standards body Accellera and the Open ... » read more

ROI Not There Yet For SysML


At some point down the road in the realm of system-level design, the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) dialect of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard may drive into semiconductor design. So far, however, a return on investment has not been established for its use. SysML is defined as a general-purpose visual modeling language for systems engineering applications, and it supports the... » read more

The Next Level Of Abstraction For System Design


Recently there have been a lot of discussions again about the next level of design abstraction for chip design. Are we there yet? Will we ever get there? Is it SystemC? UML/SysML perhaps? I am taking the approach of simply claiming victory: Over the last 20 years we have moved up beyond RTL in various areas—just in a fragmented way. However, the human limitations on our capacity for processin... » read more

UVM: What’s Stopping You?


These days, verification of the most complex designs is performed using a standard verification methodology, probably SystemVerilog-based [gettech id="31055" comment="UVM"]. Many verification teams have ramped up on UVM, but others have yet to take the plunge. Why is that? And how big a “plunge” is it, anyway? If UVM is as great as all that, then why hasn’t everybody adopted it already... » read more

A Comparison Of Embedded Non-Volatile Memory Technologies And Their Applications


With complexity of SOCs growing and time to market cycles shortening, designers need to have an arsenal of tricks to deliver highly differentiated products to market quickly. The arsenal may include SystemC, EDA tools to achieve a faster timing closure, and IP from high speed I/Os to memories. The most pervasive memory IPs are SRAM and ROM. Less pervasive memory IPs include non-volatile memory ... » read more

Is SystemC Broken?


In order to perform architectural exploration, performance analysis and optimization, early validation of software, improved productivity in hardware development and many other tasks, the industry needs a viable [getkc id="104" kc_name="virtual prototype"]. That requires a suitable language in order to express necessary concepts at a high enough level of [getkc id="101" kc_name="abstraction"] s... » read more

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